Book Size: 8" x 5.25"
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781623717544
Imprint: Interlink Books
Translator: Paula Haydar
Release date: Spring 2024
Category: LiteraturePoison in the Air
A Novel
$ 17“Douaihy wrote several novels throughout his life, and though he never intended this role, critics and friends regarded him as the narrator of Lebanese life. He wrote about aspects of Lebanese life that history books could only dream of capturing, detailing Lebanon throughout its various historical moments to its current state of dystopian ruin and collapse, a world seen vividly in his last novel, Poison in the Air.” —Elie Chalala, Al Jadid
“As Lebanon descends into civil war, a romantic young man turns into a monster … Twisting a likably naive protagonist into a malevolent beast, Douaihy invites readers to contemplate the losses and cruelties of a collapsing Lebanese society. The author’s final novel, completed just before his death in 2021, closes his oeuvre on a dissonant, mournful note.”
— Booklist
About this book
The final novel from one of Lebanon’s greatest writers and narrator of Lebanese life.
Poison in the Air, Jabbour Douaihy’s final novel, chronicles the decades of social, political, and economic turmoil leading up to and including the recent collapse of his beloved Lebanon after the horrific explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut in 2020. Douaihy brings a multitude of bottled-up toxicity to the surface, as though he is writing his last letter to the world, or a suicide note for Lebanon, as he paints a picture of a society marching down a path to self-destruction.
A first-person narration by an unnamed male protagonist, his generation’s journey—like his country’s history—seems to echo that of the phoenix. While that mythical creature is continually reborn from its own ashes, ever resilient, we now see it once again plummeting back into the fire, but as if nearly defeated, “filled with the poison of disappointments.” (Elias Khoury, L’Orient Litteraire, 2021) As imagined by Douaihy, being cut off from others and absorbed in self-interest brings out humanity’s most lethal, destructive nature.
Poison in the Air might serve as a warning to us all about the dangers of isolation and polarization, about what happens when we “sentence ourselves” to listening only to our own voices. The novel’s bleak portrayal reflects how essential it is to break out of self-contained bubbles and, like the butterfly he depicts striving toward the light, reunite with the outside world and re-embrace others, in body and in spirit.
Brand: Jabbour DouaihyAbout the authors
Jabbour Douaihy was born in Zgharta, northern Lebanon, in 1949. He holds a PhD degree in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne and worked as Professor of French Literature at the Lebanese University. To date, he has published eight award-winning works of fiction.
Paula Haydar teaches at the University of Arkansas and has translated novels by Elias Khoury, Rachid al-Daif, Jabbour Douaihy, Sahar Khalifeh and others.
Reviews
“The air of this novel is filled with the poison of disappointments, and these are the disappointments of a Lebanese generation that searched for meaning and did not find it.” —Elias Khoury, L’Orient Litteraire
“Douaihy wrote several novels throughout his life, and though he never intended this role, critics and friends regarded him as the narrator of Lebanese life. He wrote about aspects of Lebanese life that history books could only dream of capturing, detailing Lebanon throughout its various historical moments to its current state of dystopian ruin and collapse, a world seen vividly in his last novel, Poison in the Air.” —Elie Chalala, Al Jadid
Death It is the way in which he dances around it, approaches it, moves away from it, revels in it, that ismesmerizing A masterpiece.
Transfuge
Magnificentyet pessimistic clear, economical, and restrained writing.
Le Monde
A novel of petrifying acuity A masterpiece.
Le Journal du Dimanche
There is no doubt that in imagining his character, so disconcerting, so unsettling, so definitively amoral,Jabbour Douaihy thought of Meursault, whom Albert Camus made his Stranger
Le Telegramme
Sensitive Tribute to the cultural richness of a region ravaged by war.
Politis
“Dark andelegiac beauty.”
Le Courier de l’Atlas
About the Author
Paula Haydar teaches at the University of Arkansas and has translated novels by Elias Khoury, Rachid al-Daif, Jabbour Douaihy, Sahar Khalifeh and others.Â
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